Part 50

She looked a long time at him as though she would penetrate to the bottom of his thoughts.

“What proofs?” she implored.

“A correspondence which we have placed under seal.”

“Was it addressed to him? What kind of correspondence?”

“If it interests you, we will open it before you.”

“My God! My God!” she gasped. “Where have you found this correspondence? Where? Tell me where!”

“I will tell you. At the villa, in his chamber. We forced the lock of his bureau.”

She seemed to breathe again, but her father took her brutally by the arm.

“Come, Natacha, you are going to tell us what that man was doing here to-night.”

“In her chamber!” cried Matrena Petrovna.

Natacha turned toward Matrena:

“What do you believe, then? Tell me now.”

“And I, what ought I to believe?” muttered Feodor. “You have not told me yet. You did not know that man had relations with my enemies. You are innocent of that, perhaps. I wish to think so. I wish it, in the name of Heaven I wish it. But why did you receive him? Why? Why did you bring him in here, as a robber or as a...”

“Oh, papa, you know that I love Boris, that I love him with all my heart, and that I would never belong to anyone but him.”

“Then, then, then.--speak!”

The young girl had reached the crisis.

“Ah, Father, Father, do not question me! You, you above all, do not question me now. I can say nothing! There is nothing I can tell you. Excepting that I am sure--sure, you understand--that Michael Nikolaievitch did not come here last night.”

“He did come,” insisted Rouletabille in a slightly troubled voice.

“He came here with poison. He came here to poison your father, Natacha,” moaned Matrena Petrovna, who twined her hands in gestures of sincere and naive tragedy.

“And I,” replied the daughter of Feodor ardently, with an accent of conviction which made everyone there vibrate, and particularly Rouletabille, “and I, I tell you it was not he, that it was not he, that it could not possibly be he. I swear to you it was another, another.”

“But then, this other, did you let him in as well?” said Koupriane.

“Ah, yes, yes. It was I. It was I. It was I who left the window and blinds open. Yes, it is I who did that. But I did not wait for the other, the other who came to assassinate. As to Michael Nikolaievitch, I swear to you, my father, by all that is most sacred in heaven and on earth, that he could not have committed the crime that you say. And now--kill me, for there is nothing more I can say.”

“The poison,” replied Koupriane coldly, “the poison that he poured into the general’s potion was that arsenate of soda which was on the grapes the Marshal of the Court brought here. Those grapes were left by the Marshal, who warned Michael Nikolaievitch and Boris Alexandrovitch to wash them. The grapes disappeared. If Michael is innocent, do you accuse Boris?”

Natacha, who seemed to have suddenly lost all power for defending herself, moaned, begged, railed, seemed dying.

“No, no. Don’t accuse Boris. He has nothing to do with it. Don’t accuse Michael. Don’t accuse anyone so long as you don’t know. But these two are innocent. Believe me. Believe me. Ah, how shall I say it, how shall I persuade you! I am not able to say anything to you. And you have killed Michael. Ah, what have you done, what have you done!”

“We have suppressed a man,” said the icy voice of Koupriane, “who was merely the agent for the base deeds of Nihilism.”

She succeeded in recovering a new energy that in her depths of despair they would have supposed impossible. She shook her fists at Koupriane:

“It is not true, it is not true. These are slanders, infamies! The inventions of the police! Papers devised to incriminate him. There is nothing at all of what you said you found at his house. It is not possible. It is not true.”